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The unitary patent, an opt-out and a referral to the European Court of Human Rights
Could the proposed unitary patent system result in a referral to the European Court of Human Rights? Bear with me for a second while we fire up the flux capacitor and travel back in time.
It’s now 26 June 2007. Rihanna and Jay-Z are riding high in the charts with Umbrella and it’s a Tuesday. One of your clients comes to discuss the filing of their new patent application in Europe. After explaining the European patent process to your client and lamenting the fact that there’s no way of getting a single patent that covers Europe in some sort of unitary sense, your client instructs you to file a new EP patent application. Being the hyper-efficient patent attorney that you are you get the case on file later that day and settle back to a few months of discussion with the Examiner before the inevitable grant.
Time to jump back in the Delorean and fast forward 9 (!) years.
Unified Patent Court – Rules of Procedure – Consultation Open
In news that seems to have excited me far more than my colleagues who sit next to me, comes the announcement that the public consultation relating to the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court is now up and running. The consultation is open until 1 October 2013 and full details can be found here. The consultation rules draft is here. We also note that the website (www.unified-patent-court.org) contains a wealth of other information including some Questions and Answers about the Unified Patent Court.
We will provide more analysis when we can.
The Fees page is still blank though!
Mark Richardson 25 June 2013
Unitary patent package – Ratification – Allons-y!
In an earlier post we noted that the French government seemed to be gearing up to be the first EU member state to ratify the Agreement on the Unified Patent Court. Now we’ve been sent (thank you @gibus) a further document that again restates France’s intention to be the first country to ratify the UPC Agreement. Does this mean that IPcopy is finally going to be able to get a player on the pitch in our over-extended and stretched “Ratification as a football match” analogy?
If anyone has further knowledge of the planned ratification timetable in France then please feel free to chime in below.
Mark Richardson 21 June 2013
Unitary patent package – Agreement on a Unified Patent Court republished
The Agreement on a Unified Patent Court was republished yesterday. Those of you priming yourselves to review the agrement for changes can stand down – it’s merely a republication in the Official Journal of the European Union and the only changes are formatting changes!
The final texts of the unitary patent package are therefore:
- Unitary patent regulation – 1257/2012
- Translation regulation – 1260/2012
- Agreement on a Unified Patent Court – 2013/C 175/01
The 15th Draft of the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court has recently been released but a copy is not currently available. The public consultation on the rules is expected shortly and we’ll update IPcopy as soon as we get a copy.
Mark Richardson 21 June 2013
The Unitary Patent and the Fee-saving Myth: Time to put that misleading £20,000 figure back in its box, please.
Over at IPCopy, we’re annoyed. Sighs are echoing around the open plan. Hands are being thrown up into the air in despair. Ipcopymark is particularly riled, and had to be placated with a helping of pork pie.
What could have ruffled our collective feathers, I hear you ask? Well, the UKIPO website has a new webpage with details of the UK Intellectual Property Bill. This in itself is not the source of our aggravation (indeed, there is some good juicy stuff to be found there, including a link to a marked-up copy of the proposed changes to legislation, and details of the proposed secondary regulation, which the IPCopy team has been surveying with interest1), but this informative new webpage includes something that really got on our wick.
Unitary patent – Presentation from LES Meeting
On the 13th June 2013, the Licensing Executives Society of Britain and Ireland held a meeting entitled “Europe’s New Unified Patent Court – for better or for worse?“. The meeting was chaired by the Rt. Hon. Professor Sir Robin Jacob and included a number of distinguished speakers associated with the world of IP: Richard Vary (Head of Litigation at Nokia), Arnaud Michel (Gide Loyrette Nouel), Alan Johnson (Bristows) and Ian Wood (Charles Russell). Oh, and me (so an 80% distinguished speaking panel then).
The meeting covered a number of aspects of the proposed Unitary Patent system (or “A European Tragedy” as Sir Robin Jacob put it). My presentation is attached below along with a brief overview of my slides.
“US Supreme Court rules that human genes cannot be patented” – A look at the Myriad case
Image by andylepp (via Flickr.com under Creative Commons licence)
“US Supreme Court rules that human genes cannot be patented” is the headline that millions of people around the world will be reading today, after the US Supreme Court issued its decision yesterday (13 June 2013) in the ‘Myriad case’.
However, the headline for the general populace is quite different to the take-home message for those in the biotechnology community and for patent attorneys in particular. Whilst there is no doubt that some patents exist to human genes (although never in so far as they encompass a natural gene within a human being – a popular misconception in the press), patent attorneys have understood for a long time that patent offices, such as in the US and Europe, have not granted such broad patents for many years – the patentability requirements are simply too tough to obtain broad gene sequence claims in the modern era. In fact, the results of ‘the human genome sequencing project’, which opened up the possibility for people to easily try to claim human gene sequences has, in fact, made that prospect far harder. People have never needed to worry that ‘their’ genes might be patented by someone else.
In yesterday’s decision it was held that a naturally occurring DNA sequence is a product of nature and not patent eligible in the US, but a cDNA sequence is patent eligible provided it does not occur naturally.
So what would be a more realistic headline to this latest US decision? Well, fortunately for all concerned, the headline is probably not so dramatic as that stated above! We need to take a couple of steps back to understand the outcome of this latest decision.
Unitary patent package – Bits ‘n Bobs
Here’s a selection of news snippets and musings related to the Unitary Patent System from the last week.
- Members of IPcopy and Keltie LLP attended Browne Jacobson‘s annual IP seminar last week. One participant floated an interesting observation from the US (population: 314 million; states: 50) regarding the unitary patent system in Europe (EU population: 504 million; 27 member states). While we are worrying about bifurcation and central attack, it was noted that the US, which is much closer in size to the EU than to any particular member state, seems to be looking forward to a patent system that on the surface more closely resembles their own system (one large geographic area covering millions of people and “local divisions” in different states) than the current European set up. Are we setting up a system that will be more popular to people outside the EU than to those within?
IP Hit or Miss? Software Patents in Europe
In a recent article in the Guardian regarding President Obama’s plans to curb the perceived abuse of the patent system by non-practising entities (also known as patent trolls), the author points out that none of the recommendations involve a ban on software patent in the US, stating that:
“Nowhere in the administration’s recommendations is one that already applies in Europe: an outright ban on software patents…”
But is there such an “outright ban” on “software patents” (computer-implemented inventions) in Europe?
Twitter – Pull to refresh patent grants; Innovator’s Patent Agreement v1.0
tweet tweet
In previous posts we have looked at both Twitter’s proposed Innovator’s Patent Agreement and the “Twitter” patent (1, 2). In the last week or so Twitter has obtained a further granted US patent (to the “pull to refresh” feature) and has released version 1.0 of their Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA).
Down below we take a look at the latest granted patent and the first version of the IPA.
IPcopy 